by Bryan Smith
He managed to croak a single strangled word: “Mona...”
2.
Jack’s mind reeled. He’d known his long-vanished wife was a player in the strange struggle being waged between the forces represented by his father and the bad guys--with Mona being aligned with the latter camp--but a significant part of him had thus far refused to deal with the knowledge.
He had no reason to doubt anything he’d been told by either his father or Lucien. But this was the woman he’d considered his life’s only true love, the cause of so many sleepless nights after her disappearance--a problem he learned to deal with via self-medicating with alcohol. For years he’d searched for her, prayed for her safety, hoped against hope for her eventual return--even though a more pragmatic part of him had never expected to see her again.
And now here she was.
His long-lost love, more radiantly beautiful than ever. The sight of her made his heart ache and his mouth go dry. He said her name again: “Mona.”
“Good. You recognize me. That means you have at least one or two functioning brain cells left.” She moved to the edge of the bed and stared down at him. “Frankly, that’s more than I expected.”
Her insults barely registered. Jack was too entranced by the close-up view of her lithe, supple body. If she’d aged a day in ten years, he couldn’t tell. Of course, his father had told him Mona wasn’t really human. But what did that mean? Was she a demon in human form? Some other sort of hellspawn? Whatever the case, he was as helplessly drawn to her as he’d been ten years ago. He ached to touch her. To run his hands up the swell of her hips, to cup her breasts in his hands, to run his fingers through her soft blond hair.
Mona’s gaze went briefly to his groin. She arched an eyebrow and smirked. “I really can’t understand why the people I work for consider you such a threat.” She sat on the edge of the bed and curled the fingers of her right hand around his hard-on, causing Jack to gasp and arch his back. “You are so easily manipulated.” She began to lightly stroke him. “Such a slave to your vices and desires.”
Jack groaned.
Mona’s words were like daggers to his heart. But all that mattered at the moment was her exquisite touch. He looked into her pitiless eyes and saw only contempt. No passion, no love, no hint of desire. She was toying with him, manipulating him, but he didn’t care. She likely meant to kill him, but in the midst of arousal Jack considered his life an acceptable exchange for this long-denied pleasure.
Then she gave him a hard squeeze and it was over. Jack laid panting on the bed as reality came crashing back. He looked her in the eye and the contempt he saw there mirrored what he felt for himself.
Jack tried on a smirk of his own, though its effect was likely dampened by the trickles of glistening jism on his belly. “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”
Mona threw her head back and laughed. “Hardly. Consider that an act of mercy. And appreciate it. There’ll be precious little mercy from here on out.”
Jack yawned. He pointedly cast his gaze about the room again. “There any chance a guy could get a smoke in this dump?”
Mona slinked over to a nearby table and returned with a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes and a Zippo lighter. His smokes, his lighter. She tapped a cigarette out of the pack, put it between her lips, and lit it. She inhaled, then blew smoke at Jack. “The nice thing about being immortal is that I could chain-smoke these putrid things every day for eternity and never get lung cancer.”
She sat on the edge of the bed again. “Afraid I can’t say the same for you.”
She put the filter-end of the cigarette in his mouth. Jack drew in a bit of smoke and puffed it back out. “Are you saying that’s the way I’ll die? Because let me tell you something, if that’s the case, I’ve got no problem punching my own ticket before it gets bad. Death doesn’t scare me, sweetheart.”
Mona inhaled from the cigarette again. “Liar. Oh, I might have believed you a few days ago, Jack. You’ve been a suicidal, self-destructive waste of oxygen for a long time, and we’ve been content to let you slowly dig your own grave.” She smiled. “But things have changed, haven’t they?”
Jack forced an exaggerated frown. “Uh...what else have you been smoking? As best I can tell that’s still a dead-on description of yours truly.”
Mona sighed. “Must you lie so? Tell me about your father.”
Jack tried to look perplexed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know my father’s dead. He drowned. Remember? You took off right after. Funny about that. I assumed you just couldn’t handle dealing with my grief.” He grinned. “Little did I know I was simply no longer any use to you.”
Mona rolled her eyes. “You’re a terrible actor. Tell me, Jack, just how is it you know I married you to get close to Professor Grimm?”
“Lucien told me.”
“Bullshit.”
Jack’s brow furrowed. “Say...where is that handsome devil of a hellhound, anyway?”
Mona chuckled. “In the desert. With some associates of mine. But put that traitor out of your mind. You won’t be seeing him again.”
“They’re going to kill him.”
Mona nodded. “Yes. But do as I said and put it out of your mind. You can’t stop it. You can’t even save yourself.” She puffed on the dwindling cigarette again. “What you can do, however, is spare yourself a lot of grief. I’ve spent thousands of years refining many exquisite methods of torture. I’ll happily spend as much time as necessary employing each one of them on you to gain the information I want. Use your imagination, Jack. Think about the pain awaiting you. You’re not capable of enduring it.”
Jack’s expression hardened. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
Mona smiled. “I appreciate that you have to put on a brave front. You are a man, after all. A decrepit, alcoholic wreck of a man, yes, but a man nonetheless. But don’t kid yourself--what you’re facing will break you.” She put a hand on his leg. “So do yourself a favor. Tell me what you know about your father’s whereabouts and his plans and I’ll make your death an easy one.” Her hand caressed his thigh. “There may even be a mercy fuck in it for you. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Jack willed his barbarian libido not to respond to her ministrations. It wasn’t one of the easier things he had ever done, but he managed it. “Go to hell, Mona.”
Mona laughed. “Such wit. Is that really the best you’ve got, Jack?” She made a tsk-tsk noise and shook her head. “My, but you’ve declined in more ways than I realized. Hell is my home, moron. I love it there.”
“You’re ugly.”
“What?”
“You’re disgustingly hideous.” The force of his words surprised Jack. His helplessness, his utter inability to do anything to save either himself or Lucien, had at last overwhelmed his unease and fear and was working to stoke a righteous anger. “Looking at you makes me want to projectile vomit.”
“I’m beautiful.”
But Jack had at last broken through her smug veneer. Her mouth was a tight line of anger and her jaw quivered with barely repressed rage.
Jack laughed. “Yeah, you look like a real babe. A million dollar dame. No denying that. But it’s an illusion, isn’t it? A disguise. Inside, you’re uglier than sun-baked roadkill. Come on, Mona, pull back the mask, let’s see what the inner demon looks like. I’ll bet a gazillion dollars you’re not centerfold material beneath that pretty facade.”
Mona’s eyes went wide. She shook with fury. Jack expected her to rip his throat out any moment now. He didn’t want to die, not anymore, but at least he could take his father’s secrets back to hell with him.
But Mona didn’t rip out his throat. Instead, she slowly pulled herself back together. She flicked away the smoked-to-the-filter Lucky Strike and extracted another from the pack. She smiled. “Oh, Jack. I may have underestimated you. I have to admit it--you did rattle me. You’re still going to tell me what I want to know.” She lit the cigarette and flipped the Zippo shut. “But you
can forget about that mercy fuck.”
Jack grunted. “Whatever. Could you just get on with the torture? You’re boring the shit out of me, doll.”
“Your wish is my command, darling.”
Jack screamed.
And screamed again.
Mona smiled broadly. She removed another cigarette from the pack. “Ah, but I love the smell of burning flesh in the morning.”
Jack watched the Zippo flare to life again.
And watched the lit tip of the cigarette descend.
3.
The scent of blood was strong in Lucien’s nostrils. This would ordinarily trigger an immediate and involuntary shift to full-hound mode. There was just one exception to the rule--when the blood was his own. He coughed and more blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.
He blinked his eyes to clear his vision and saw the tall fat man gearing up to deliver another blow with the Louisville Slugger. He watched the fat end of the bat swoop through the warm desert air like a dive-bombing Japanese Zero at Pearl Harbor. The tall fat man was incredibly strong, and the blow was like a cannonball to the gut. Lucien wheezed, spraying a fine mist of blood into the air. His body sagged, drooping in the straining arms of two other big men.
The tall fat man twirled the bat in his right hand. “Look at me, freak.” He put the fat end of the bat under Lucien’s chin and lifted it up. The big man went in and out of focus. “You’re hurting, right? Bet you feel like you’ve done ten rounds with Rocky Marciano. But you know what? I’m just getting warmed up. Your pretty-boy face is about to get reconstructed. Unless you tell me what I want to hear.”
Lucien struggled to focus. This pain was beyond anything he’d experienced as a member of the hellpack. In hell, he’d inflicted pain like this on countless damned souls. It’d been his job. He’d not relished it, but he’d done his job well to keep up appearances. He supposed what he was enduring now could be construed as a kind of cosmic justice on behalf of his victims.
No, he would not be swayed by such thoughts. He’d been sent to this mortal realm to do penance for his sins and to protect its inhabitants from forces conspiring to destroy their civilization and enslave them.
Forces represented at the moment by this psychotic Babe Ruth wannabe. The man had to be six and a half feet tall, weighed maybe three-hundred and fifty pounds. He had a big bald head and an immaculately trimmed brown goatee. If not for his expensive, tailored clothes, he’d be taken for some sort of circus freak.
Lucien yearned to rip his throat out and piss down his neck. And he would do exactly that, except that whatever had been used to drug him was inhibiting his ability to switch to hound mode. He sensed that he could possibly still effect the change if he could just get enough of a break from the pain to concentrate.
The big man sighed. “If you’re not gonna talk, you’re no use to us, hellspawn. You know that.” He smiled. “Which means I’m free to crush your skull.”
He went into batting stance again.
Lucien’s mind screamed a single word at him: STALL!
Lucien cleared his throat and spit out another gob of bloody saliva. He managed to breathe a barely audible word: “Wait.”
The bat-wielding behemoth paused in the middle of a practice swing. He let the fat end of the bat swing downward and touch the ground, and he leaned on it like a cane. He grinned. “You ready to talk?”
Lucien cleared his throat and spit out another wad of blood and saliva. “Give me a minute.” He made his eyes flutter, and he wobbled a bit. He wanted them to think he was on the verge of losing consciousness, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Anything to gain a little time. He had to think of something to tell them, some misleading nugget of half-truth to make them keep listening.
Then he had it. He blinked his eyes hard and made the big man come into focus. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.” He coughed yet again, making the phlegmy sound rattle deep inside him. “Anything to stop this.”
The big man’s grin broadened. “Aw, poor little hellhound can’t take it, eh? Fuck, but you’re pathetic. A dozen or so shots from Lucy here--” He raised the bat and caressed it. “--and you’re ready to spill your guts. I’ve known men, human fucking beings, who held out longer than you. Some I even beat to fucking death because they wouldn’t talk. Ain’t that somethin’? Mortal men who were willing to die rather than spill a secret that might harm people they care about.” He grunted, shook his head. “And you, you big fearsome beast from hell, all you give a rat’s ass about is saving yourself a little pain. You make me fucking sick.”
As if to emphasize his disgust with Lucien’s lack of moral fiber, the big man hocked up a wad of saliva and spat it at the ground between Lucien’s feet.
Lucien sighed. “Do you want to hear what I have to say or are you trying to talk me out of it?”
The big man smirked. “Go ahead, pussy. Start squawkin’.”
Lucien drew in a deep breath. He did his best to project the air of a man making a shameful admission to save his own hide. “You’ll let me go after this, right? If I hand over the big prize, you’ll let me walk away.”
The big man cackled. He shrugged his shoulders in an exaggeratedly magnanimous gesture. “Yeah, sure, you bet.” The men holding Lucien chuckled. “I’ll even give you a lollypop and a pat on the head for being such a good boy.”
“You’ll have no reason to kill me.” Lucien put a slight quaver in his voice and hoped he wasn’t overplaying it. “The people I work for won’t want anything to do with me when they find out I’ve betrayed them.”
The big man nodded. “Fuckin’ A right they won’t. I was them, I’d hunt you down and skin you alive.”
Lucien looked the man in the eye, taking the full brunt of his piercing gaze. “I’ll just walk away from all of this, okay? I’ll be out of the game for good. I won’t be a problem for your people anymore.”
“You’re not a problem now, jackass.” The big man yawned. “But I’m getting tired of listening to you yammer on without tellin’ me nothin’. If I like what you tell me, I’ll consider letting you go. No promises.” He started twirling the bat again. “I don’t start hearing about this ‘big prize’ soon, I’m gonna start whaling on you again until you’re nothin’ but a smear on the ground. You got five seconds, starting now. Five, four--”
Lucien said, “I know where Theodore Grimm is.” His mouth formed a small smile. “And I can take you right to him.”
“Is that a fact?”
Lucien nodded. “Imagine it. You deliver Grimm’s head on a platter to your boss. You, the man solely responsible for eliminating his biggest threat. Tell me, how well do you think the man in a position to do that would be rewarded?”
The big man smirked. “Clever beast, playing the greed card like that..” But the glint in the man’s eyes belied his sarcasm. Lucien was no telepath, but he could almost hear the man’s private thoughts--he was envisioning a bounty of wealth and women, of all his material needs and desires forever met. “Boss’d want old man Grimm alive, anyway. At first.”
Lucien sighed. “Dead, alive, I don’t care.” He met the man’s gaze again, daring him to see through the facade. “As long as I’m still breathing and on my way out of Nevada by sunrise, you people can do whatever you want with the wizard.”
The big man cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re not playing me, are you?”
Lucien shook his head. “No.”
The big man gestured at him with the fat end of the baseball bat. “Because I think I’d have to spend the rest of the morning pulverizing every goddamn bone in your body if you were.”
The man grasping Lucien’s right arm snorted laughter. “He ain’t kiddin’. I’ve seen him do it. This one guy, he was still alive after Hank went to town on him with that bat o’ his. We sat out here, drank some beer, and watched the sumbitch flop around and scream for hours.”
The man holding his left arm said, “Shit, that was a good time. I ‘bout lost it when Jimbo pulled that boy’s
britches down and stuck a firecracker up his ass.”
All-around laughter from his captors.
Lucien kept his gaze steady on the man with the bat. The big man. Hank. It was good to know his name now. He knew these men weren’t lying. They were sociopaths and sadists. They gave no more thought to killing a man than they would to swatting a fly. The grief of families and loved ones meant nothing to them. Men such as these were a cancer, a diseased and defective segment of the human race. As such, there was only one way to deal with them--by excising the cancer.
Lucien joined them in their laughter.
Hank’s laughter subsided and his brow furrowed. “What are you laughing at, hellhound?”
Lucien was still laughing. “At you, fat man. At you and your inbred cronies here.”
Hank sneered. “You are so fucking dead.” He went into a batting stance again. “Hold that bastard still, boys, while I knock his goddamn fool head off.”
“Uh...” said the man so amused by the memory of a firecracker exploding in a crippled victim’s ass. “Hank, he said he knew where that Grimm bastard was...”
“He’s lying. Do like I said and make sure he don’t move.” Hank’s eyes blazed with rage. “Else I’ll bust up you assholes, too.”
The men’s grips tightened around their captive’s arms.
Lucien grinned broadly at Hank. “Here comes hell, you son of a bitch.”
The change came over Lucien with startling quickness. His muscle mass increased greatly in seconds and his head was a blur as it changed shape and sprouted fur from every pore. A surge of exhilaration exploded within him. He’d hoped to buy enough time to fight off the effects of the drug and bring on the change and these idiots had been stupid enough to accommodate him. The men holding him screamed and released him. Hank gaped at him in utter stupefaction for a moment before recovering enough to raise the baseball bat again.
One of the other men said, “That bitch said that fuckin’ drug would stop this!”